22 May 2011
I’ve been thinking about art that makes you “feel” and art that makes you “think” and the intersection/layering thereof. Your comments please (specific examples especially welcome) on the following, from Susan Sontag‘s 1964 essay on French filmmaker Robert Bresson (a master, in Sontag’s opinion, of “reflective art”):
Some art aims directly arousing the feelings; some art appeals to the feelings through the route of intelligence. There is art that involves, that creates empathy. There is art that detaches, that provokes reflection.
Great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed. […]
In reflective art, the form of the work of art is present in an emphatic way.
The effect of the spectator’s being aware of the form is to elongate or to retard the emotions. For, to the extent that we are conscious of form in a work of art, we become somewhat detached; our emotions do not respond in the same way as they do in real life. Awareness of form does two things simultaneously: it gives a sensuous pleasure independent of the “content,” and it invites the use of intelligence.
25 April 2011
A nice piece by Linda Homes at NPR (thanks to Jane for passing along) about the anxiety many of us have these days re: “so much to read, so little time.” She makes the argument that the sadness we feel about “what we’re missing,” because there’s just too much good stuff out there, is also a beautiful thing; and that we should resist “culling,” which is her term for coping with the volume of choices by mentally eliminating entire categories of art from our “worthwhile” list.
Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love.
It’s sad, but it’s also … great, really. Imagine if you’d seen everything good, or if you knew about everything good. Imagine if you really got to all the recordings and books and movies you’re “supposed to see.” Imagine you got through everybody’s list, until everything you hadn’t read didn’t really need reading. That would imply that all the cultural value the world has managed to produce since a glob of primordial ooze first picked up a violin is so tiny and insignificant that a single human being can gobble all of it in one lifetime. That would make us failures, I think.
If “well-read” means “not missing anything,” then nobody has a chance. If “well-read” means “making a genuine effort to explore thoughtfully,” then yes, we can all be well-read. But what we’ve seen is always going to be a very small cup dipped out of a very big ocean, and turning your back on the ocean to stare into the cup can’t change that.
And here’s an interesting response in the comments from someone who disagrees, who thinks generalism is a waste of time:
Endeavor to contribute in your special way, and humanity grows. It’s a fools errand to personally know all knowledge. It’s a liars ruse if one claims to know all. Furthermore, if you knew and could do all, there would be scant appreciation for those that excel at only a few things. Would the great artists, architects and leaders be useful if all were as capable?
I have to admit that I have culling tendencies; though I’d like to think that I cull in a thoughtful way, as opposed to a dismissive one. In other words, in my experience, culling is not easy, it means developing priorities based on an aesthetic and/or personal value system that’s idiosyncratic by virtue of having formed over time. It also recognizes reality; I can’t know or do everything, so I’ll work on what I can. I trust the people who are gifted otherwise to cover those areas, while I cover mine. Be master of such as you have, is how Barry Hannah put it. Perhaps the compromise is that the culling process works best when it’s evolving and organic. Tomorrow I may evolve into, say, an Italian film enthusiast; but only if I’m open to it.
15 March 2011
From Jenni Quilter‘s essay in the exhibition catalogue for “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters and Poets,” which closed earlier this month:
“[The publisher] didn’t just find some painter and some poet who would work together. She asked two men who really knew each other’s work and life backwards, which means to include all the absurdity and civilization a lively mind sees in friendship and art.”
-Larry Rivers on “Stones,” a collaboration (12 lithographs) between Rivers and Frank O’Hara
I’m intrigued by these examples of collaboration; there is a feeling of a different time, when artists mingled more freely, perhaps more deeply, and collaborations sprung from these intimacies.
“…the accumulation of time spent with a friend – the discussions about art, parties, movies visited, theater productions, visits to the opera, beaches swum at, vacations gone on, heartbreaks listened to, ecstasies encouraged, bitchiness and generosity, slow fades and sudden infatuations – these experiences might be the shared ground from which an imagined world could be created.”
JOAN MITCHELL
Drawing to James Schuyler‘s poem “Sunday”
I’ve been thinking lately about the comeback of the stable nuclear family to the lives of artists. The artists and writers I know are all very committed to their families – to material and emotional stability. I am no exception. This can only be a good thing. Except, I wonder, maybe, for art, the creation of which is always on some level at odds with life. Stability requires schedules, boundaries, a certain measure of containment.
“Friendships are amorphous creatures, prone to sprouting new limbs and self-amputating others, easily misidentified and disconcerting in the sudden strength and satiations of appetite. Their development is messy, and it’s this fluidity that allows projects to be easily proposed.”
LARRY RIVERS
Pyrography: Poem and Portrait of John Ashbery II
The back-to-family zeitgeist has perhaps improved upon the messiness of artistic lives from a previous generation. For example, I’ve been reading Javier Marias‘s Written Lives, which (according to the back cover) chronicles “the fairly disastrous” stories of twenty great world authors – Faulkner, Joyce, Turgenev, Malcolm Lowry, Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, etc alia. Disastrous, indeed. And yet, I wonder if in gaining health and stability, we aren’t losing some fluidity.
LARRY RIVERS and KENNETH KOCH
In Bed
In the end, we do and make and live as we can, as best we can. Rivers, O’Hara, Ashbery, Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Koch, Schuyler, Fairfield Porter, Jane Freilicher – these artists collaborated because they could, because the energy and chemistry was there, because they wanted to work, because why not, what did they have to lose. You just can’t force that kind of thing.
3 March 2011
It’s a little like falling in love, when you find a kind of literary mentor from afar.
I had a great, great fear that I was bent on doing something for which I have no ability, and that took years and years to get rid of…that I was dedicating my life to something I was not fit for.
I am uncertain about every line I write and I am uncertain until I get readers.
Like every form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.
-from Michael Ondaatje‘s introduction to The Paris Stories
That last quote makes Gallant sound perhaps melodramatic about life as an artiste, but if you read her work you know that melodrama is not a part of her lexicon or world view. She is speaking, I think, to the stakes of literature – the quality of both our reading and writing, how real is our commitment – if you have chosen it as your path. Gallant chose it above all else, this is clear. I think about how selfish that choice must have seemed to others throughout her life; and yet look at what she’s given us.
26 February 2011
If you live in New York, try to get to the “Painters & Poets” exhibit at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifth Ave at 56th Street. It closes on March 5. I’ll write more about it soon.
From the gallery Web site:
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery marks its 60th anniversary with “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters and Poets,” an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s pivotal role in launching the New York School of Poets and fostering a new collaborative ethos among poets and painters in post-War New York. The exhibit focuses on the gallery’s first two decades, the 1950s and ‘60s, when its vibrant, salon-like atmosphere and director John Bernard Myers’ passion for both art and poetry gave birth to these unique partnerships.
The show features paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Leslie, Trevor Winkfield, Nell Blaine, Joe Brainard, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter; poetry collections published by the gallery’s imprint, Tibor de Nagy Editions, and featuring work by Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest and others, with illustrations by Tibor de Nagy artists; photographs and films by Rudy Burckhardt; letters, announcement cards and other ephemera; and archival photographs of leading cultural figures of the day by John Gruen and Fred McDarrah.
And here is Peter Schjeldahl on the show from the New Yorker.
15 February 2011
I’ve been chewing on a few things Nicholson Baker said at a recent lecture:
1. Write short books. This extends, in his opinion, to “read short books.” There is, of course, some relief for me here. I’ve been thinking lately about how a big book in some ways has the same requirements as a short story, i.e. every word must be compelling. Otherwise, how will the reader persist? Middlemarch was compelling from beginning to end. War & Peace is my summer project (I am hopeful). 2666 lost me in the midst of the endless litany of murders. (Note: I am a slow reader; fast readers will find all of this inconsequential. The divide between fast readers and slow readers is enormous in terms of reading prioritization.) Short books, Baker contends, are each really part of the larger, singular work of an artist; in other words, all the books you write are of a piece, so why not make them compact.
2. Copy out writing that you admire – regularly, religiously. I’ve always done this but I am inspired by the “regularly, religiously.” It feels so inefficient to do this – it takes time, forces you to slow down (you should do it by hand, in my opinion) – but it isn’t. It seems almost too simple, i.e. teach yourself to write by writing someone else’s actual good words. But I do think there’s something else that happens, a kind of transference, when you actually engage physically with good/great words and sentences and ideas.
3. Block yourself off from the world. You have to get distance in order to get closer, is how Baker put it. And the goal of all good novels is to get closer – to the human experience, to life on earth. You can’t get closer from within, it’s like trying to capture the image of a person’s face when you’re nose to nose. As a matter of practical example, he often writes with headphones on, blasting music that floods his brain and functions as a buffer between his mind and his environment.
I don’t always get out for readings and lectures, but it’s good – especially the reminders that it’s supposed to be difficult. ”You can’t get what it means to write honestly until you’ve suffered something,” Baker said. We twist ourselves up when we lapse into the erroneous expectation that it should come easy.
29 January 2011
I’m thinking about this because I’ve been reading and teaching stories by Flannery O’Connor. Her characters are so vivid and real, so particular and alive; but O’Connor does not much go in for psychologizing. We know who these characters are, but not so much WHY they are the way they are or how they got that way. We accept them as fact; she is that good at incarnating full human beings and staking out their territory of reality. A student observed that O’Connor clearly knew their psychology inside and out, which is how she is able to render them so well, via their externalities. This, I think, is a kind of argument for “write what you know,” i.e. write the characters you know inside and out, intuitively, so that the external details you select to characterize them will inevitably (one hopes) evoke both the present and the past of that character.
O’Connor’s characters are also no doubt creatures of the South, of a particular era. Those of us working in a more heterogeneous, multi-cultural, multi-geographical universe perhaps are required to consider more these questions of back story, of childhood experience, of what brings adult character A to situation or conflict X – that psycho-experiential map.
A colleague spoke the other day (during a thesis conference) about the coming-of-age genre, how that genre’s power is in giving the reader a compact story, the most formative experiences from ages x to xx; and then leaving us at that juncture, at the precipice, before the character transitions into adulthood. The emotional impact is in the projection and the resonance; the reader feels how these experiences may shape the character’s adult journey, we have a sense of knowing what paths the adult life will take – tragic, hopeful, what have you.
I don’t know. Psychology is in many ways the enemy of art and literature; it claims predictability, a+b=c. And yet we are all so profoundly shaped by both the language and conceptions of modern psychology, developmental narratives, etc. I myself often query students to consider what has shaped their character in his or her past, WHY is he or she like this? I recognize the danger of it, the too-easy map from A to B; the draining of mystery, or, as O’Connor would put it, “the mystery of personality.” But on the other hand there is the question of coherence, of writing characters who behave in credible ways, who feel human by virtue of the ways in which they process and absorb experience.
But people are strange. This perhaps is the truth underlying all truths about human behavior; experience certainly confirms it.
Let It Dough
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29 December 2010
Thanks to JW for turning me on to Chris Niemann‘s Abstract City Blog at the NY Times. The Christmas cookie ritual is sacred for me, so I love this. ”Sloth” is my favorite.
Family, “Family”
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23 December 2010
Of course, ’tis the season of family – awareness/appreciation of, along with (re)consideration of who these people are and what it all means. We watched THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT the other night, a meaningful and complex portrait of a new kind of family, i.e. one with two moms + sperm donor. In the end, the film seems to be less about “lesbian family” and more about — as the philandering Jules (Julianne Moore) says, tearfully and remorsefully — “Marriage is hard.” (It’s also, a little bit, about “men are clueless,” or at least Mark Ruffalo‘s character Paul is; but there seems to be hope for boys, and girls too, i.e. the kids are all right.)
I’m haunted a little by a recent re-reading of Toni Morrison‘s A Mercy. It’s a story of makeshift family – a white couple, a Native American slave, two indentured servants, two black slave girls, a free black man — of misfits coming together in the wilderness, shedding conventional obligations and communal connections, partially by choice and partially by no-choice. In the end, their ties are not strong enough to hold: “They once thought they were a kind of family because together they had carved companionship out of isolation. But the family they imagined they had become was false. Whatever each one loved, sought, or escaped, their futures were separate and anyone’s guess.” Of course all this takes place in a ruthless, slavery-centered, 17th century world. Have we made progress?
Random, but possibly related: I recently learned that a pretty good friend of mine comes from a quite famous family. It’s striking to learn such a thing, both for the fact itself and for the intentional belatedness of the revelation. There are the people who come before us, and everything/everyone that comes after, blood-wise, inheritance-wise; this pattern of breaking from one’s familial past/being unable to escape one’s inheritance seems to me The Story of Life. I’m thinking also of Jean-Michel Basquiat (another recently-watched film, i.e. THE RADIANT CHILD), whose father apparently disapproved of his “lack of respectability,” and it pained Jean-Michel deeply, to the bitter end.
I seem to have blogged myself into a rather dark place here. So let me return to the beginning: may your holidays be filled with appreciation, hope, and progress.
12 December 2010
Here is a book you should know about, if you don’t already: The Literary Life, by Robert Phelps and Peter Deane. The book’s subtitle is, “A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950,” which rather says it all. It has the physical feel of a high school yearbook, and some of the gossipy excitement of Facebook.
Year by year we learn of seminal books published in the US and around the world, awards granted, important works in other artistic disciplines, deaths (of literary personages), and a particularly fun section called “In the Margin,” made up of tidbits like
DH Lawrence, 27, elopes with Mrs. Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, staying at Metz, Germany, where local authorities arrest Lawrence as a spy (1912), and
Employed as an assistant night manager in a New York hotel, Nathanael West, 25, works on his first novel, and “arranges” special rates and free rooms for various friends, among them Dashiell Hammett, who finishes The Maltese Falcon (1927)
The book is also filled with notable (and little-known) author quotes and photos (just like a yearbook). The Literary Life is out of print, but ABE Books can point you to some copies.
28 November 2010
I confess that the winter holidays are not my best time of year. They sneak up on me, and all of a sudden I realize I’m tense and furrowed in the brow. From now until January 2, I will, figuratively speaking, be closing my eyes and thinking of England. [Note: I'm not sure where this expression comes from, originally. I know that I took it from Aaron Sorkin/The West Wing and use it probably too often.]
A few years ago it dawned on me that somewhere along the way I’d allowed Rockwellian kitsch to get under my skin. That year, my family had exploded into chaos. On impulse, and with little in the way of better alternatives, I went straight to the source, a kind of exorcism: I spent Christmas at a bed and breakfast in Stockbridge, MA — Norman Rockwell country. We ate prime rib by the hearth, the whole deal. It was snowing buckets. We drove by Rockwell’s house, went to the Rockwell Museum, I even bought the monograph. I learned that Rockwell’s work had been misappropriated; that he was an artist of dimensional talents; that his life and vision were nothing like the weirdly placid winter-wonderland harmony Americans had internalized.
This year, Flavorwire offers us “5 Literary Families More Dysfunctional Than Yours.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve read each of these, and treasure them all. Enjoy!
Update (thanks, Wendy!): on the origins of the expression “Close your eyes and think of England” – hilarious!
22 July 2010
Julian Schnabel is known for his ego — an artist who perhaps better than anyone inhabits/embodies the non-normative fullness of that word; neither “good” nor “bad,” just what it is. He’s a polymath, and a talented one, and I confess that his ball-busting, I-could-give-a-fuck attitude intrigues me, despite myself. Not to mention his just-do-it creative output. I’m a wildly successful painter; I think I’ll make a movie now, and a really good one. And now another one, and another, and I think I’ll learn French so I can make this third one (and win Best Director at Cannes and at the Oscars)…
Flavorwire describes Schnabel as “one of the most motivated creative forces of the past 40 years.”
(It is not lost on me that my last post was about “the ambition of growing okra.” Clearly, we are cut from different cloth, Mr. Schnabel and me. Likely the root of the intrigue…)
Now Schnabel has a new exhibit of large-format Polaroids, with accompanying monograph. More info here.
Here’s a link to a radio interview with Elvis Mitchell from 2008.
